Back to bloggin, back to blogging. So, what should I blog about first? How about the second part of the band mini album project that I believe I said I would share a full month ago? Geez. I specifically typed: "I thought I would do a few posts, spread out over the next week or two (or three, depending on how life goes), on the process of creating this project and getting it all assembled". I guess we know how life went for me the last month!
I talked about my supplies for this project in THIS POST, and today I thought I would share a bit about the photo process of the project. Which was kind of a huge process, and one that I'm still working on getting finished. I would guess that 98% of the photos I am including in this album came from Alyssa's iPod, older cell phone, and/or her iPhone. So the first step was waiting for her to have the time to get all of the photos together for me. I had her put everything on a flashdrive, so that I could easily transfer it all to my laptop.
Alyssa did have the majority of the photos seperated into folders for each year. She had very little for freshman year, a small amount for sophomore year, and tons of photos for junior and senior year. Then there were lots of random photos that we had to figure out which year they fell into. It's nice when you can hold your curser over a photo and it will give you the date the photo was taken. But that doesn't always happen when they're from cell phones, screenshotted from other friend's phones, etc. We did the best we could to figure out where everything went.
The next step was sorting out the photos within each year's folder. I knew I could pretty much group the majority of the photos into "events", which would make them easy to organize into the album. Like having all the photos from one concert together, all the photos from the football games together, etc. I created folders for each concert and/or event, and just started plopping photos into those folders.
The next step was going into each event folder, and getting the photos ready to print. I ended up doing a little bit of editing on most of the photos. Not too much though. There were definately photos that I wish I could have worked more magic on (remember, a lot weren't the best quality), but they were what they were and I was ok with that. Once I had edited the photos, I moved the original photos into a new folder, just to get them out of the way.
Then it came time to figure out what sizes I wanted to print each photo. I knew that my photos would be either 4x6", 2x2", 3x3", 4x4", or 2x3" in size. For each event, I picked at least two photos that would make great 4x6's, and would look good on the opening and closing page of that event's section in the album. For events that had a large quantity of photos, I often choose even more 4x6" photos, but I knew from the start I wanted at least two of that size.
I tried to get a good look at how many photos I had for each event, how they could be cropped (would squares work, or would they have to be kept in full), and then determine what divided page protectors would hold them the best. From there, I would start cropping and getting them ready to print.
For each photo I was going to have printed, I named them with the year and the event name. So the photos in the screenshot above are labeled "SeniorYear_FallConcert_1", "SeniorYear_FallConcert_2", etc. This made it easy to sort them out after I picked up my photo order.
For the smaller sized photos, I cropped them and placed them onto 4x6" canvases, so that I could fit multiple photos together. I could put two 3x3's on a 4x6 photo, four 2x2's on a 4x6 photo (you can technically put six on there, but I found they were cutting a little bit off one side of my print, so I stuck with four), four 2x3's on a 4x6 photo, etc.
I even put my 4x4's on a 4x6 photo. I could have just printed them as 4x6", but by cropping them myself and sticking them onto the 4x6 canvas, I knew exactly where to trim them to get that 4x4" square. If that makes sense.
I had a folder within each event folder to plop my "to print" photos into. Once I had gotten all of the photos from an event ready to go, I simply signed into my Costco account and uploaded those photos into my "Band Album Project" album. Since I live about two miles from Costco, I would usually do an order each day, since it was easy enough to run and pick them up.
I really got into a good workflow while working on these photos, and I got pretty quick at deciding what size to print, cropping them, sticking them on canvases, etc. I could whip out events left and right. It's been a while since I've worked on this project (I blame summer!), so when I go back to finish these, I know it will take me a while to get in my groove again.
I'll share the next part of this project in the next week or so (don't sit around waiting for it, but it WILL be coming!), and I'll show you what I did with all of those photos once I picked them up and brought them home.
I like how you broke this very large task into smaller pieces - such a good way to keep things moving forward, allowing you to work on different types of tasks so you wouldn't get burned out on any one task. I know I tend to lose momentum on bigger projects when I am doing the same thing over and over.
Thanks for sharing! I hope you had a great summer. I'm sure you were busy getting Alyssa ready for college. Take care.
Posted by: Ruth G | August 29, 2014 at 06:37 AM